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Opinion

Opinion

Based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events.

Trudeau gets abortion policy exactly right: Mallick

“The days when old men get to decide what a woman does with her body are long gone. Times have changed for the better. #LPC defends rights.” This was Liberal party Leader Justin Trudeau’s tweeted response to seven former Liberal MPs who publicly objected to his decision that Liberals must speak with one voice on abortion rights. Anti-choice candidates are no longer welcome in the party and a certain kind of dinosaur objected to this.

These men, in their weird public protest, also mentioned other “moral issues,” as they put it, including assisted suicide, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research and “animal/human genetic splicing,” of all things. To my knowledge, no political party has issued a statement on cats and dogs sleeping together. I wait agog.

Trudeau is right. The era when women’s bodies were a public space is over, not just for old men but for men and women of any age who oppose equal rights. Feminism is a joint project between men and women.

Women have control of their bodies. Everyone has control of their own selves. Yet these men named John, Tom, Garnet, Pat, Murray, Rex and Janko rose out of retirement to rage at the idea that men like them are a dead weight on the party, that they are being “discriminated against” for their wish to regulate young women’s bodies.

I don’t know what these men were doing in the Liberal party in the first place. Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn’t want them in the Conservative party either, not if they won’t shut up about social issues. Fighting over personal matters like abortion is a political sinkhole. In the words of Conservative MP Gordon O’Connor, one of my favourite older men, to the House of Commons in 2012 when he was government whip, “Abortion is and always will be part of society . . . It cannot be eliminated. I cannot understand why those adamantly opposed to abortion want to impose their belief on others by way of the Criminal Code.”

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The seven men had always been on the extreme right, some part of a Liberal anti-abortion club, some opposing the Charter, others members of Campaign Life Coalition who also oppose gay marriage and basically anything that might relate to “down there” issues. One of them, Pat O’Brien, told the Globe that Trudeau was trying to “cosy up” to left-wing voters. He doesn’t understand that women’s rights are no longer left-wing. They are mainstream now. He’s on the riverbank waving vainly for a barge from 1952 but it is long gone, even in Harperland.

The British author Simon Kuper has written in the Financial Times of London about a great change in the world happening as we live and breathe right now. “2013 was the year when most western societies sanctified the equal relationship.” You’ll have noticed how there are more news stories now about pedophilia and the beating of children, about prostitution and the physical abuse of women. The men in these stories are seen as contemptible. That’s new.

Relationships that used to be massively unequal, with the powerful tormenting the weak, are no longer considered socially acceptable. If you disagree, sorry, you’re on the wrong side of history. The change has been massive and subterranean. Kuper credited the sociologist Anthony Giddens and other thinkers for tracking this change but he could equally look to literature, modern music, human rights law and medicine, and most notably to the influence of idealistic Scandinavian nations.

I have written before about Kuper and his notion of the new orthodoxy of equality in the western nations. The most difficult part of journalism is to be ahead of the times, to warn readers about what is coming up. People who lazily assume, for instance, that prostitution is an ancient and eternal habit don’t understand that change is afoot. Prostitutes and their buyers have a power inequality. At the insistence of the Supreme Court of Canada, Bill C-36 recognizes this and seeks to end it.

Until recently in human history, 30 was considered a good age. Now many people in the West might reasonably expect to live to 100, which makes assisted suicide worth considering. Stomping one’s foot and saying that other people should have to endure decades of pain and disability? That is a misuse of the power of the young and healthy.

Trudeau has done the right thing morally and politically. Those who oppose this policy should join the Conservatives but I doubt they’ll feel at home there either, thankfully.

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